The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        This is how his odyssey began.
        One day his journey would become famous, but for now it had been forced abruptly upon him. He was granted no say in the matter.
        No hometown band had graced his farewell with the sweet familiar strains of smooth and tuneful music; no "bon voyages" rang lustily in his elephantine ears. No champagne bottles had shattered upon his brow as kindred cast their caps and proffered boisterous cheers in fond remembrances of bygone days; no telegrams, no flowers, bid him fast and safe return. There was only the mud, and the gnats that stung his eyes, and running, breathing in ragged gasps as he struggled stumbling through the mud. And back, back, far behind him, tracking him down with relentless step upon slithering step, there was only.....The Gator.
        He had stepped upon her baby. He had always been too soft hearted for his own good.
        The tiny gator had squealed so vehemently that Frogstick was at first taken aback. But he had overruled the paranoiac thought that the baby gator might be calling for help. Seizing it in his calloused hands, he set its slimy little broken leg with a green stick and some string as it squealed wildly the entire time. He had just placed the whining dragon back onto the ground when it happened.
        "Oooooeeee!!!" the disgusting little brute had hissed, swinging its head in anger as he had gingerly placed it back onto the spongy swamp grass. Its open mouth gaped menacingly, the bane of any unprotected pinkie; it was a future dog-eater if ever one wore alligator hide. Frogstick had walked away from this ill-natured beast wondering if he had done the right thing in saving its life. Perhaps he should have crushed its flimsy head beneath his boot heel, or even more cruelly left it to die a slow death as a crippled reptile in a twisted wicked world. But no, he had spared the wretch. He really didn't have the heart to hurt a fly.
        As he cogitated thusly, Frogstick walked out onto a big log that lay across a pool that was in his path. Suddenly the log exploded upwards at him, sending him spinning through the air. The log turned into a massive alligator that threw up its hoary head and roared a thunderous challenge against the sky. Saliva and filthy water sprayed from its shining body in a profuse shower of liquid diamonds that glinted brilliantly in the clear autumn sunlight. The gator was a monster, well over twenty feet long and as wide as a small car.
        Frozen in fear, Frogstick watched in amazement as the giant reptile doubled back and swirled around in the shallow water to face him. Lifting its tremendous bulk upon tree-trunk legs it began to slowly march out of the watery mire, hissing and spitting at him as it came. Its roar was a dull thud in his reeling head.
        "Run," said his mind, but his legs were jelly. "Run!" cried his mind, but his knees were like water. Then the gator took another step and roared as if to shake the earth.
        Frogstick was running. He didn't know how it happened, but he was running. He sailed. He flew. He ran for his life. The roar of the gator faded into the distance as he leaped over logs and cypress knees. Then he found his voice and he hollered as if his life depended upon it.
        "HELP!" he cried, "GATORS! GATORS!" It was this cry that we had heard echoing across the treacherous marshes that bordered the Grizzly Dismal.
        He ran for about 30 minutes before he paused to catch his breath. He had been scared out of his wits by the gigantic 'gator. Now he stopped in the cool shade of a stand of hickories that stood like silent sentinels arrayed at the top of a sandy hill that overlooked the natural border of the gloomy marshland.
        Frogstick was entering Florida's ridge, that humpbacked sandy spine that runs down the middle of the state from north of Gainesville all of the way south to Lake Okeechobee. From his elevated perch, Frogstick could easily see the vast and trackless depths of the great Grizzly Dismal splayed out to the east of him like a life-sized bad dream permanently sculpted in slime.
        As he sat on a fallen hickory, hanging his head and panting heavily, he happened to glance back along the path that he had just traveled through the scattered brush and blackjack oaks below him. Suddenly a shock of horror sent sickening waves of adrenalin coursing through his body.
        Below him, in the midst of the oaks and palmettos at the foot of the hill, the massive alligator was slowly picking its way along his trail. Like a tracking hound it sniffed the ground and bushes as it crept through the dense scrub, intent upon following the spoor of the hapless Stick-man.
        The tiny gator with the splinted leg was perched upon the big gator's wide, knotty back. Like a reptilian Captain Ahab it lurched up on down upon the rolling deck, stomping morosely from bow to stern as it railed against poor old Frogstick with vicious, malicious, and possibly libelous squawks and squeals. The tiny gator's vituperative billingsgate was answered with enraged grunts form his sympathetic mama gator.
        Frogstick watched in amazement as another five-foot gator crawled into sight below him. It seemed to be taking up the rear of this unsightly procession. By now Frogstick's mind was staggering; it reeled in all of this ocular input like a drunken sailor with an unwanted catch. What was a poor twit to do?
        In a flash it came to him.
        He couldn't lead this dangerous group back towards the camp; he would have to head on out into the great Nowhere County wilderness and try to shake this pack of would-be carnivores. Then and only then could he return to his beloved friends (which were us, the popular and fully human members of the Incredible Hootenannies).
        With iron resolve, Frogstick hitched up his britches and headed west into the great oak forest that covered the northern half of the vast Nowhere County Wilderness Area. He little dreamed of the strange and wondrous experiences that lay ahead of him, or of the many miles that he would traverse before his bizarre odyssey would end.